Why Experts Can Make their Postcard Designs Faster than you

Ever wonder why those experts can dish out a design for postcard printing so much faster than you. In fact, a professional designer can make an effective and beautiful layout for print postcards in less than 30 minutes in some cases. They can usually do this because they already have adopted a lot of time saving devices and techniques that makes it easier for them to design for postcard printing. Let me teach you the tricks on how they do this so that you can also be as fast as them when it comes to postcard printing and design.
• They make and use their own postcard templates - The basics of being fast in designing for postcard printing are the use of templates. Whether it is downloaded from a professional postcard printing company's website or home grown from a person's skill, postcard templates take a lot of the initial work away. The design process is faster because you will not have to deal with all the mundane initial setups of dimensions, guidelines and standard layouts. Designers can immediately jump in and start the artistic word for print postcards.

So do not be afraid. Use templates or create some of your own. It will make your job a little easier in postcard printing.

• They have pre-set styles - Most designers of color postcards also have pre-set styles. By styles I mean special formatting and design settings for images and text already saved on the software application. By using this, you only need to click once on a style setting to add all the design formatting set for that special style. So you do not have to add all those effects, filters and other formatting effects one by one to add a certain style to images or text. Everything is done quickly with one click.

The good thing about styles also is that you can use the effect en masse. If you have lots of image layers or text layers to change to a certain style, you can just select those layers and then apply the style to all of them at one. So really, styles are a big time saving feature and you must try to adopt it for your designs for color postcards.

• They know time saving design tricks - Another very important thing you have to know about expert designers is that they already know the best time saving design tricks and other image manipulation features that software applications have. For example, did you know that Adobe Photoshop can do batch processing? If you have hundreds of images that you need rotated and resized for use in your postcard designs, it is going to be hard to do it one by one. Designers use batch processing in Photoshop to set some key commands and then have the whole batch processed at once. These key time-saving features are not totally obvious for some, but once learned it really helps a lot. So try to learn all the key time saving design features that will help you.

• They know the keyboard shortcuts - Of course, while we are at software time saving features, you might also want to know that most experts try to learn the keyboard shortcuts for most common commands. From changing text to bold (ctrl + b) to enabling the free transform command (ctrl + t), these little shortcuts do pile up to lots of time savings. So make sure you learn them, especially the commands that you use most often.

So as you can see, expert designers have a lot of tricks up their sleeves to make the design process for postcard printing faster and easier. Try to learn these tricks for a faster time in your own design process.